In 2016, J.D. Vance informally launched his political career with "Hillbilly Elegy," a memoir that blames the relative poverty of Appalachian and Rust Belt populations on their own culture. Despite its reactionary premise, mainstream and liberal press outlets were so enamored by the book that they accidentally made Vance a senator.
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In 2016, J.D. Vance informally launched his political career with "Hillbilly Elegy," a memoir that blames the relative poverty of Appalachian and Rust Belt populations on their own culture. Despite its reactionary premise, mainstream and liberal press outlets were so enamored by the book that they accidentally made Vance a senator.
Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod
Where to find us:
Sources:
Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!
Peter: Michael.
Michael: Peter.
Peter: What do about Hillbilly Elegy?
Michael: I know that the book made the argument that we have to understand rural whites so that they can run for Senate and take our rights away.
[If Books Could Kill theme music]
Peter: This is sort of a weird episode for us, an unusual episode because this is a memoir. The subtitle of Hillbilly Elegy is "A memoir of a family and culture in crisis." It is, of course, written by Senator J. D. Vance. It is. [laughs]
Michael: God. Jesus Christ.
Peter: Sorry. I'll be saying Senator a lot just for emphasis throughout the episode.
Michael: We're already in the "could kill" part of the episode.
Peter: What makes this book pernicious, what makes it a good book for our podcast, is that when it came out in 2016, it was a sensation among mainstream liberals. You have to situate yourself in 2016 to understand it. We're in the midst of the ascendance of Trump. His success, I suppose, just leaves a lot of liberals kind of stumped. And the dominant media narrative that emerges is that Trump was kind of hoisted to victory by the white working class.
Michael: The economically anxious among us.
Peter: That's right. The coverage of this demographic was just breathless, like they had discovered a new species of white people. Every piece of mainstream political reporting for like six months was just a reporter wandering into a Waffle House and being like, "Today we're speaking to the complete buffoons who love Donald Trump."
Michael: Just physically shoving aside all the minorities who live in the south. He's like, “No, I need the downtrodden whites.”
Peter: So, it's this moment that catapults J. D. Vance to some fame, because Hillbilly Elegy came out in 2016 before the election, and it allowed him to position himself as the white working-class whisperer. The guy who understood these people and was here to explain them to the New Yorker set.
The blurbs in the book speak volumes because you have the basic conservative-- David Brooks liked it, Rod Dreher. But then also, Mother Jones, Vox, Slate, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic and Bill Gates, all with kind words to say about Hillbilly Elegy. That's worth noting because this is a book that maligns poor people. It's a book with very weird racial politics. So, I want to pull some of these themes out, but also just talk about how and why this stuff gets laundered for mainstream consumption and why this was such a hit with liberals.
Michael: It's the weird self-flagellation industrial complex. You know the old quote that a liberal is someone who's too fair minded to take his own side in an argument?
Peter: Yeah.
Michael: It's like something about the sort of I guess, overanalytical, centrist, relatively well-off liberals that's like, "We have to understand this." Basically, keep digging until you find something sympathetic which as a philosophical principle, I think, is really good, being generous, being fair, but also when that is not matched by any similar impulse on the other side. What you basically have is an entire media where it's like the conservatives are bashing liberals and liberals are bashing liberals.
Peter: Yeah, I think that's right. I also think that another component of that is that when someone like Vance comes along and offers a criticism of his own people, liberals eat that up because to them, it seems very thoughtful, almost self-critical. And they're like, “Oh, this is fascinating. This is a man who is reflecting on his own culture.” This is like when there's a black conservative who's like, "The left is making too big of a deal about race these days," and conservatives immediately elevate them to every talk show.
Michael: They should have put Candace Owens on the cover of this to give you the typology, Mima and my bootstraps.
Peter: So, I will do my best to give you the basic narrative here, and we're not going to spend too much time talking about the narrative itself, but I want to go through it. So, his grandparents migrate from Appalachia into the Rust Belt town of Middletown, Ohio. He's raised by a combination of his mother, grandparents, sister, and whatever man happens to be in his mother's life at the time.
There are times when the book is compelling, at least in the micro. There are these stories about drug use, about alcoholism, casual violence all in and around his family, all throughout his life. His mother suffers from addiction. She is constantly cycling through relationships. She frequently spirals into abusive behavior. She attempts suicide at one point, and because of all this, it's sort of his grandparents and sister who really do the work of raising him. His grandmother is the family matriarch. She's a firecracker, very profane, very protective of the family, always giving him life lessons. He says that she has a hillbilly morality and that means that she is kindhearted but also, if someone insults the family or threatens the family in some ways, she will immediately go to violence.
Michael: She already sounds like Oscar bait for some ambitious actress who wants to play this role.
Peter: At one point his mother has a particularly bad downward spiral where she begs a 11-year-old J.D. to give her a clean urine sample, after which he moves in with his grandmother. He's much happier, gets much better grades, and he sort of credits that period of stability for him being able to get out of there, basically.
He goes straight to the military. He joins the Marines out of high school. This is where the book gets incredibly dull and derivative because you're no longer hearing fun anecdotes about growing up in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Instead, it's just like, "Boot camp turned me into a man."
Michael: Yeah. The book just becomes the training montage from G.I. Jane. Yeah, doing one arm push-ups in a tank top.
Peter: He gets sent to Iraq, and he says that he escaped any real fighting. It turns out he was a public affairs Marine, which is a Marine who is essentially like embedded PR.
Michael: Tom Cruise in the first 10 minutes of Edge of Tomorrow.
Peter: Yes, yes. I am so glad that we can talk about Edge of Tomorrow.
Michael: The weaselly short kids of Hollywood. Yes.
Peter: He goes to Ohio state after that, and from there he goes to Yale Law School. There are just countless tedious anecdotes about all the ways in which he's not accustomed to fancy things. He's gawking at how clean the wine glasses are at cocktail receptions, how much silverware there is at nice restaurants. He spits out sparkling water because he didn't realize what it was and had never heard of it.
Michael: Some of this feels fake. We all saw Titanic. There's a whole fucking thing about the silverware in there. That's like the poor kid who doesn't understand upper crust society starter pack.
Peter: By the end of the book, he's lost any remnants of his folksy charm because he is an elite at the end of the book by every material metric. But he's still trying to do the same shtick. It's like, “I'm just a simple country boy from Ohio. How would I know which senator to work for?” And it's like, “Am I supposed to relate to this somehow?”
Michael: These kinds of political memoirs always have to kind of lie about their own level of ambition because if you end up going to Yale, you really wanted to go, which there's nothing wrong with that. But it's in these books, I feel like they usually have to present this entrance to elite institutions as something that just happens to you.
Peter: Right. It's interesting because in the book, he's writing himself as if he literally stumbles into Yale Law. And it's sort of like, I don't know, as someone who went through the law school application process, you didn't stumble your way into Yale Law. You worked insanely hard in college. You tried very hard on the LSAT.
He sort of will mention, as he's getting older, like, “Oh, I took a job for this state senator.” He's sort of acting as if he's just taking a job so we can get by. No, he's climbing up the political ladder so that he could build his way to this very moment when he's publishing this book, trying to get popular so that he can eventually run for office.
Michael: Oh, my God. It's like a Julie and Julia where the end of the movie is Amy Adams getting a call from Nora Ephron wanting to turn her book into a movie. What you've just watched is the final chapter of her arc. He's written a best-selling political memoir about becoming the kind of person who could write a bestselling political memoir.
Peter: That's right. He meets his future wife at Yale, Usha. She would go on to clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts. Impressive that he manages to meet a conservative young lady at an institution like Yale Law that is dominated by Marxists.
Michael: Yes. Incredible that he was able to embark on a heterosexual relationship on a college campus without widespread protest.
Peter: One of the best cameos in the book is his mentorship by Professor Amy Chua, the Tiger Mom.
Michael: Oh, the Tiger Mom. Yeah.
Peter: Who has since gotten into trouble at Yale for some inappropriate remarks while partying with students and whose husband was suspended after various students made allegations of sexual harassment.
Michael: So, the real cameo here is cancel culture.
Peter: From a young boy roaming the hills of Appalachia to a young man befriending our nation's most powerful sex perverts. It's the American Dream, Mike.
Michael: Yeah, it's a real Cinderella story of a prestigious law school producing a social conservative. Incredible.
Peter: I just want to read you a quote before we get to the socioeconomic analysis within the book. He says, “I'm the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela Corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood's cheesy anthem, Proud to be an American. When I was 16, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so.” I'll say this, he's right about one thing. As an Acela Corridor guy, I do laugh at people like this. “When I was 16, I vowed to always immediately assault any veteran that I saw.”
Michael: "I keep a stack of small American flags with me at all times so I can burn them on the Acela Corridor in case I see anybody in uniform."
Peter: So, the biggest issue with this book is the way that Vance talks about poverty. One of the first things that he does is lay out his thesis about the people of Appalachia. He says that many people believe that the problems in the region stem from the lack of economic opportunity. He says that's part of it, but it actually gets the real problem backwards. The real problem is a decaying culture, which in turn creates or worsens poverty.
He tells the story of working in a warehouse where there is a worker who was chronically late and would take multiple very long breaks every day. When the guy is fired, he lashes out at the boss saying, “How could he do this to me?” Vance says that this experience taught him that the problems with the region, “Run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy,” and that there are, “Too many young men immune to hard work.”
Michael: I thought there were all kinds of statistics about social mobility in the United States, but it turns out that a lazy guy got fired and was mad about it. So, who's to say what's right?
Peter: The prevailing theme of the book is that working class whites would be able to lift themselves out of poverty if only they believed it were possible. It's their negativity, their learned helplessness that keeps them down.
Michael: Einstein taught us that the universe evolved from thought and that time is an illusion.
Peter: This is the overlap between The Secret and Hillbilly Elegy. It's true.
Michael: To believe this about America, you have to believe that compared to other developed nations, we just have higher rates of bad attitudes. That's why there's more poor people in America than there are in Denmark.
Peter: Right. You're looking at an unemployment chart, and in your mind, it's just measuring laziness over time. That's why he's always relying on anecdotes. He's not a data guy. There are 21 citations in the book total, which is low in and of itself, but also especially weird because he often makes factual claims without citation. At one point, he says that you can't rely on surveys about how much people are working because working class people lie about how much they work.
Michael: Huge problem. Huge problem.
[laughter]
Peter: And then later, he refers to a groundbreaking study about upward mobility in America. But he doesn't cite either one. I don't think he's lying about them. I just think he's immune to the hard work of citing them, if I had to guess. So, let's get a little big picture here. I don't want to harp on his inability to cite things properly. He talks about data that shows that people without college degrees are working less than people with college degrees. There's competing data on this, but I think that the best data shows that's basically true. They work fewer hours overall.
But the primary reason that people without college degrees work fewer hours is that there is less work available to them. There's tons of data about this. I used a lot of data from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Vance is publishing this in 2016. In the 2008 recession, workers with a high school education or less lost 5.6 million jobs. In the recovery, they recovered 80,000 of those jobs. They left the recession with 5.5 million fewer jobs in 2016 right than there were in 2007. If you look at workers with bachelor's degrees, they left that same period with a net gain of 8.5 million jobs. This is the fundamental problem with Vance's thesis.
He's claiming that the real issue in Appalachia and the Rust Belt is this cultural unwillingness to work. But there is quite literally less work to do than there was before. You could snap your fingers and give everyone in his town a great work ethic. Unemployment would still be relatively high because you still run into the wall of fewer available jobs. You're not going to reopen the factories with good work ethic.
Michael: The funny thing is this has also ended up screwing over people with bachelor's degrees, because a lot of those people graduated from college during the recession and ended up taking entry-level jobs for which they don't even really need a bachelor's degree. The people without bachelor's degrees, they just can't claw their way into any entry-level position because all those positions are taken up by people with college degrees.
Peter: Right. The data bears all of this out. Like 50 years ago, a considerable majority of jobs were available to anyone without a college degree, and now it's a small minority. I think it's something like 30%. It's super bizarre to individualize this obviously structural problem.
Michael: It's also very funny because conservatives never apply the same logic to the wealthy. "Oh, Americans make less money than people in other developed countries." Maybe we just have shittier rich people here, J.D. Maybe our rich are just the fucking worst, like that guy who was a bad worker and got fired and was mad about it, okay, fine, I see you and raise you Donald Sterling. If we're building US policy around the cultural malignancy of certain societal groups, I would like to start at the Country Clubs and work our way down.
Peter: All right, I'm going to send you little excerpt. This is a story from when J.D. Vance was a young man working in a local grocery store.
Michael: That was my first job too.
Peter: I bet you didn't work as hard as J.D. Vance, Michael.
Michael: That is fucking true. That is absolutely accurate. “I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They'd ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They'd regularly go through the checkout line, speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.” Wow, American social welfare, famously too generous. This is why we have such low rates of poverty and such high rates of hammock naps.
Peter: So, first of all, yeah, food stamp fraud happens and is real. Fraud rates are very low, though. Something like 1% of benefits. Also, some of this is not even fraud. Buying food with food stamps and then beer with cash, that's not illegal. That's just how buying things works.
Michael: They also do that with-- they probably buy food with food stamps, and then they buy diapers with cash because diapers aren't covered by food stamps.
Peter: Just because you're on food stamps doesn't mean you're not allowed to buy other things with cash.
Michael: I love how he starts out by saying, “I saw poor people gaming the system," and then it's just a description of people on the verge of having a nice time.
Peter: Also, he says that, "Their life feels like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I had only dreamed about." But later in the book, he admits that his family did receive government benefits. And in fact, it's a big part of how his grandmother put food on the table. It's just this deserving and undeserving poor thing that he does. "Of course, my family should be receiving welfare. We're some of the good ones, we put it to good use."
Michael: It's like the debate online about ghosting, whether it's okay to just stop calling somebody that you met on a dating app on the Internet. It's like ghosting is exclusively something that is done to you, not something that you do to other people. By definition, I've never ghosted on anyone. But it's this behavior that it's like the government benefits that I get. That's not government largesse. That's just helping us out in a difficult time. These people are on their cell phones, Peter. They're playing Angry Birds when they should be going to church and joining an MLM.
Peter: That's right. Yeah. I've sent you something else.
Michael: Okay, okay, I just read the whole thing. Okay, I like where he's going with this. All right. He says, “To many analysts, terms like welfare queen conjure unfair images of the lazy black mom living on the dole. Readers of this book will realize quickly that there is little relationship between that specter and my argument. I've known many welfare queens. Some of them were my neighbors, and all were white.” Love it. It's like, don't use the welfare queen stereotype on black moms. Use it on everybody.
Peter: “You might think that I'm racist. Wrong. I hate all poor people.” He basically says, in so many words, "Racism is real. I'm not saying it's not real, but I want to talk about a kind of poverty that is experienced by white people.” If you look at just the book, there's not much more than that. But if you look at some of his other work, there are times when he trots out white poverty as sort of a defense against claims of discrimination. There are poor white people too. So, the relative poverty of black people isn't proof of anything.
Michael: That's like my favorite response to police brutality accusations that it's like, “Look, they shot this white guy.” I'm not owned by this at all.
Peter: Vance does hedge quite a bit. He will say, “Look, we can't discount systemic issues that cause poverty.” I think that he's basically doing that to maintain an appropriate level of deniability because he never dives into that meaningfully. It's always just sort of a disclaimer. But of course, the primary thesis of the book, I mean, it's called A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. It's not called Memoir of a Region That Has Been Systematically Separated from The Wealth of The Rest of The Country.
Michael: It's also very funny because if you were looking at a foreign country and you saw, there's a really poor region of Peru or something, and someone told you that there used to be all these mines where they employed a bunch of people, and then all of those employers have shut down and there's far fewer jobs. You'd be like, “Oh, well, yeah, that's probably why there's so much unemployment there.” But he's like, “No, no, no, the attitudes of the people changed.”
Peter: I think he sort of has like a combination of explanations. One of them is a very bizarre ethnic explanation where he says that the region is primarily Scots-Irish heritage.
Michael: Oh, my God, really? He's going back to 1800s racism, where it's like, “Oh, there's too many swarthy Italians."
Peter: The more sensible sort of explanation that he occasionally hints at is that you have systemic poverty causing these cultural issues to some degree, but then the cultural issues perpetuate, which I think is sort of true in a vacuum, but it's also the whole story. The systemic poverty needs to come first. It must come first. And the output is these cultural artifacts that are associated with poverty. He's sort of skipping over the fact that he's getting it exactly backwards.
Michael: Right. And also, even if you want to argue that culture is the most important factor or whatever, what can we do about it? What would fixing a culture even mean? I mean, that's just like lecturing people until they have different attitudes.
Peter: Well, I think what he's actually advocating for, although he doesn't say it super explicitly, is fewer interventions by the government.
Michael: Right. Well, that's always where it comes back to, yeah.
Peter: Right. To punish them for their laziness rather than "reward" their laziness. That's what he sort of hints at. You can see it in his other writings at the time, he wrote for National Review at the time that he's publishing this book, and he's got pieces about how he thinks welfare in Appalachia has failed and is not productive. So, that is the endgame here. The irony is that the decline of Appalachia economically actually lines up really well with cuts to welfare. So, yes, if cutting welfare worked, you would think you would have seen some improvement in Appalachian poverty rates rather than what we'd actually seen, which is a severe decline in standards of living across the region.
Michael: Unfortunately, we have no choice but to keep cutting until I never see anyone at a grocery store with a cell phone.
Peter: All right, I'm going to send you another quote.
Michael: Okay. He says, “This was my world, a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poor house. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we're upper class. And when the dust clears when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity, there's nothing left over. Nothing for the kids' college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn't spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.” Oh, love the "we" in here.
Peter: I was going to talk about the we because he's trying to create this impression that he's like, talking about himself too, “I'm empathetic.” But the book is literally full of tales of him making wise financial decisions and generally being responsible directly contrasted with those around him. It's like, "Here I was working hard at the grocery store while the poor people strolled by me with cell phones and beer. It's gross." And again, just another demand that poor people lead punishingly frugal lives or else we can write them off as moral failures. Like, “Oh, you say you're poor, but you have a TV.”
Michael: I feel like conservatives always reach for TVs when they're like, “Look how nice the lives of the poor are.” Like, TVs are unbelievably cheap now.
Peter: Right. There's the famous Fox News clip being like, “Did you know that 99 point something percent of people below the poverty line have refrigerators?” It's very well established that lower income people spend a higher share of their income on core needs than higher income people. There were a couple of economists from Duke and University of Texas, Austin, that analyzed consumer expenditure data and found that lower income families and that's families with income under two times the poverty line, spend about 75% of their total income on food, transportation, rent, utilities and cell phone service.
The idea that there's this big problem with frivolous spending in poor communities, it's just fiction. It's just bootstrap bullshit. They want you to write off their suffering by imagining that it's the product of a series of terrible decisions that you don't have to have any empathy for.
Michael: This whole thing is so weird to me because it's always blaming the people with the least amount of power. I think that some people probably did buy way too much house in the run up to the 2008 crash. But also, that's because those people were being told systematically that was a good investment and the housing market couldn't crash. Who's the villain in that scenario? The person who should have known better who was fucking lying to them? Or the people who believed someone who they thought had more expertise?
Peter: Right. And also, frankly, you shouldn't have to make a flawless series of financial decisions to get through life.
Michael: I will also say on the cell phones thing, if you're a poor person, getting a smartphone is probably one of the best investments you could possibly make.
Peter: How would you get a job without one? You either need email or phone. You need a phone. You need a phone to function in our society these days. The idea that it's a luxury is just false. It's objectively not correct. Also, note that he says, "Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high interest credit cards and payday loans." Particularly notable because later in the book, there's a weird digression where he defends payday lending--
Peter: Nice. [laughs]
Michael: --which is great because he's sort of hiding the fact that at the time of writing this book, he's a creepy venture capital guy now. And then, "Payday loans are good," and you're like, “Oh, right, I forgot that he's a Silicon Valley asshole.”
Peter: Yeah, he's just defending whoever's in power. This is just the classic conservative thing of whatever hierarchy exists in the world must be just and right. So, of course you defend the payday lender and criticize the people who take out payday loans.
Peter: Right. Vance tells a story about how a payday loan once helped him avoid an overdraft fee. And then, he says that government officials who want to ban the practice are ignoring stories like his.
Michael: What? When I moved to Sydney when I was 19, I was all of a sudden, drinking age, which I hadn't been before. I started going to gay bars and I didn't know how to hit on dudes, so I would walk up to them-- This was when you could smoke in bars and restaurants. I would walk up to people and bum a cigarette because I didn't know how else to start conversations. So, I basically ended up making out with a bunch of chimney mouth dudes because I didn't know what else. I could just imagine myself testifying at a congressional hearing and being like, “When you regulate cigarettes, you're taking that experience away. You're preventing 19-year-old me from having regrettable sex.” It's disgusting.
Peter: Oh, man. When this book first came out, it was very interesting to see the spate of great reviews and then a handful of people being like, "This is gross and it's gawking and pointing at poor people." A lot of those reviewers were from Appalachia and they could immediately clock this. Whereas I think a lot of mainstream sources that reviewed this book were relatively well-off journalists, etc., who are happy to believe this stuff if someone kind of gives them the right framing and the right sort of excuse.
Michael: But then, did we skip over the part where he's not even really from Appalachia?
Peter: So, not only is he not really from Appalachia, but even his grandmother left when she was sort of young. The book sort of bounces between the Rust Belt and Appalachia because he's growing up in Middletown, Ohio, and he's often in Jackson, Kentucky. A big part of his narrative is that people moved from the mountains into the Rust Belts, and so a lot of the culture carries over.
Michael: I guess. You could say that about anywhere in America though.
Peter: Yeah, it felt a little bit squishy. I will note that there have been people who basically said he's not from there.
Michael: My dad is from Ohio. I wouldn't describe myself as, like, from the Midwest.
Peter: I didn't know I was talking to a real hillbilly, Michael.
[laughter]
Michael: But which fork do I use, Peter? Which one's in front of me? There's just this weird stolen valor thing that's over all of this.
Peter: Yeah, I think he would claim that he spent a lot of time there, etc., and that he's basically familiar enough with the culture. But I think it's safe to say that based on what we know about J.D. Vance's opportunism and his relationship to the truth. it's more accurate to look at him as just sort of part of the, "Let's all go into a rural diner and do some interviews," style of journalism than it is to view him as someone who is really from there, telling you the story.
There are people from Appalachia who study Appalachia, who have all sorts of interesting and nuanced things to say about the region. There was more than one book that was written in response to this book. There was one called Appalachian Reckoning, which is a collection of essays. It's a good reminder that there are academics who study this stuff. I think what J.D. Vance is a guy who is really, in his soul, a cosmopolitan type. This is someone who wanted to be in politics, who wanted to go to a snazzy law school, who wanted to do venture capital. Perhaps he exaggerated his association with Appalachia to allow himself to write this book.
Michael: The funny thing is if you really want to understand Trump voters, it's not even clear to me that you would be looking to poor people in Appalachia. You would be looking to well-off used car dealers in the Philadelphia Exurbs.
Peter: Yeah, that's probably a good segue into this book's relationship with race, which is very weird, and it's certainly not the book's focus. But again, he starts off talking about how much of Appalachian ancestry is Scots-Irish. He is describing the distinct ethnography of that region, and he's also consistently talking about the white working class. So, there's like this implied racial discussion happening throughout the book. But whenever the question of race comes up directly, he is always downplaying it. As soon as page eight of the book, he says that he hopes people avoid, “Filtering their views through a racial prism when they talk about poverty.” I'm going to send you a page of the book. He is talking here about negative perceptions of Barack Obama in the Rust Belt.
Peter: He says, “Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the President, but the President feels like an alien to many Middletonian for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor, which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up. He made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis, and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him.
Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right, adversity familiar to many of us, but that was long before any of us knew him. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father, while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it, not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right.” What is this? This one black dude did fine, so racism doesn't exist or something?
Peter: He's trying to say that Obama is just sort of like an elite. That's why people in the Rust Belt don't really like him. Okay, that's almost certainly part of it. He's like, “Look, he wears a suit to work,” and it's like, yeah, he's the president. When's the last time you saw a president who didn't consistently wear a suit? It's just like this weird excuse-making to avoid the idea that race is a part of why people did not like Obama.
Michael: It's also weird because his description of Obama here sounds like a description of him. And the fact that these rural whites don't hate J.D. Vance to the same extent does actually indicate that race might have something to do with it. Although they also kind of hate J.D. Vance.
Peter: Well, that's different because he deserves it. There's a couple of other areas where he just downplays race in weird ways. He describes the racial makeup of his hometown as, “Lots of white and black people, but few others.” It's actually 85% white. I don't get why he would imply that it wasn't overwhelmingly white except to avoid a conversation about race. Early in the book, Vance lists a handful of academics who he thinks have done valuable work on social mobility, and one of them is Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve.
Michael: Unfortunately, the IQs are just too low. The IQs just aren't there for people to have jobs.
Peter: And it goes a little beyond that. In November of 2016, the American Enterprise Institute, a big conservative libertarian think tank that employs Murray, hosted an event where Murray interviewed J.D. Vance about the book. At one point, they joked about Vance having "pretty clean Scots-Irish blood.”
Michael: If there's one thing I love about this J.D. Vance guy, it's his skull shape and his brain pan.
Peter: Now, there's almost no discussion of sexuality in this book at all. There's one anecdote about homosexuality. J.D. is eight or nine years old. He thinks that he might be gay because he doesn't really like girls and his friends are boys. He hears about gay people and he's like, “That might be me.”
Michael: That's what gay is.
Peter: And this is the anecdote that ensues.
Michael: He says, “I broached this issue with Mama, confessing that I was gay and worried that I would burn in hell. She said, ‘Don't be a fucking idiot. How could you know you're gay?’ I explained my thought process. Mama chuckled and seemed to consider how she might explain to a boy my age. Finally, she asked, ‘J.D. do you want to suck dicks?’ I was flabbergasted. Why would someone want to do that? She repeated herself, and I said, ‘Of course not.’ Then, she said, ‘You're not gay, and even if you did want to suck dicks, that would be okay. God would still love you.’” All right, I'm into this book now. It's fine.
Michael: [laughs] It is interesting that presumably the implication here is that eight-year-old J.D. Vance did want to eat pussy. That's not my memory of being an eight-year-old, but to each his or her own.
Michael: Although according to The Sopranos, that's also gay. So, either way.
Peter: That's right. [laughs] This is a good example of just fairly open deception. This is a little aside thrown in to reassure liberal readers that he's on the level. Even his firecracker grandmother didn't really care if you're gay or not. But spoiler alert, J.D. Vance is a senator now, so we might have some insight into his views about LGBT people that we didn't in 2016.
Michael: God, over the last 15, 20 years, I've become so frustrated with the way that being cool with gay people has become a cover for just a huge iceberg of evil reactionary beliefs of people like Peter Thiel who are just straightforward far right, but then it's like, “Oh, but he's gay.” Okay, well, that's complicated. And it's this sort of stuff too, where it's just because you're okay with gay people doesn't invalidate the other 99 beliefs that you're laying out.
Peter: Also, now there's, like, an extra asterisk where it's like, “Well, other than the groomers.”
[laughter]
So, let's talk a bit about the liberal response to this book. Again, liberals and moderate mainstream media sources just loved it. The New York Times called it "a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass."
Michael: Oh, my God.
Peter: He spoke at the Brookings Institute. Vox gave him extensive coverage. There were only a handful of negative reviews of the book. Sarah Jones, who I spoke with to prepare for this, she was writing for The New Republic at the time, and she wrote a critical piece. Jacobin published a critical review also by someone who's from Appalachia. So, I was sort of like, "Why? What is causing all of these libs to embrace such an obviously reactionary message?"
When I asked people from Appalachia about this, their response first and foremost was like, “Well, this is just how mainstream Americans, liberal or not, have always talked about us.” Poor people within Appalachia have always served as a bit of a punchline in American culture. I do think that helps explain why so many people were comfortable with it. But I'm not sure that it explains the media phenomenon of the book. It doesn't explain it getting so much attention and J.D. Vance being elevated to the degree he was.
My best educated guess at what happened here was that at a time when liberals were so frustrated with the ascendance of Trump, it was cathartic for them in that political moment to hear these people who they associated with Trump disparaged and blamed for their own predicament. There's this sort of predisposition in American culture to disparaging the poor. It's just part of our culture that it's sort of their fault. But the political moment allowed liberals to sort of grab that with both hands, because in their minds, this book was insulting to Trump voters, and it was telling them that what was really happening with Trump voters was that they were society's losers and they were lashing out at you, society's winners.
Michael: But then, what's so weird is, because I didn't read the book, but at the time, I always saw it framed as sympathy for poor rural whites and almost like a distraction from the very obvious racism that drove Trump's victory in the election. There was this weird explosion after the election of looking for any explanation other than the most obvious one. Someone appealed to the racism of white people. And so, it's weird that the actual book is blaming rural whites. But the framing of the book by people who didn't read it, or people like me who just read reviews, was exonerating rural whites.
Peter: Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of that is the output of him doing that faux empathy where he's, “We spend too much on TVs.” I think that gave people just enough deniability. I mean, the New York Times is calling it compassionate. It's not a compassionate view of these people. It's a sharply critical view.
One interesting thing about this is that as much as liberals read this and heard what they wanted to hear, conservatives did too. When you read National Review's review of the book, it is embracing these really reactionary aspects. They summarize the book by saying that, “It chronicles how white Appalachians have 'followed the black underclass and Native Americans,' not just into family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies, but also, perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort.”
Michael: Jesus Christ. That's dark.
Peter: It's fucking nasty. A lot of what sort of slips under the radar to liberals is immediately clocked by conservatives and sort of held up as the crux of the book. National Review, as disgusting as that quote is correctly identifying the precise theme of the book. If you're a conservative, you've been blaming the black poor and Native American poor for their plight for decades. And this is Vance doing the same exact thing to the white poor.
Michael: It's very funny that he was cast at the time as, "The conservative who's pushing back," or, "He's not like the other conservatives." And then, actual conservatives were like, “No, we like this guy.”
Peter: It's liberals who are missing it. It's incredible how many people heard what they wanted to hear when they were reading this book.
Michael: Does that come through in the movie? I haven't seen it.
Peter: It's hard to say that the movie has a message because it's just sort of taking the narrative portion of the story, removing everything else and holding it up and throwing Amy Adams and Glenn Close at it and asking for Oscars. I'm a big Amy Adams fan and a real enemy of her agent. #SaveAmy.
Michael: Something happened after she did the arrival. She forgot to read her career backwards to herself. Something weird happened.
Peter: Yeah, the movie. I mean, God, it's bizarre. It takes the usual liberties with the story. I do need to talk about the most inexplicable addition, which is a line about the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Michael: What?
Peter: Yeah. In the book, Mama is a fan of the Terminator. But in the movie, they add a line where she says, “Everyone in this world is one of three kinds, a good Terminator, a bad Terminator, and neutral.”
Michael: What? That doesn't even make sense with the canon of the Terminator film.
Peter: [laughs] What’s a neutral terminator?
Michael: What’s a neutral--? What would its mission be? Is that Andrew Yang? Is that who she's talking about?
Peter: Oh, shit.
Michael: As the neutral terminator?
Peter: The neutral terminator. My wife and I paused it and we're like, “What?”
Michael: They went out of their way. They're like, “We need something more here.”
Peter: Ron Howard is that like a table read, he's like, “Are there really just two kinds, good and bad?” And someone's like, “Well, no, I think there might be neutral as well.” Well, now J.D. Vance is terminating welfare benefits for struggling families, so--
Michael: Way to transition us back.
Peter: Flawless segue. Let's talk about his Senate campaign.
Michael: It's so bleak.
Peter: Vance was comparing Trump and Hitler, like really aggressive criticism. Then, he sort of begins campaigning a couple of years later and things change. He grows a beard to cover up what can only be described as a disturbingly boyish face. He pivots hard. He starts buttering up Trump to get his endorsement. It's like the usual groveling where he's like, “You know I said some pretty mean things about Mr. Trump, but he's actually the best president ever and the coolest guy ever met.”
Michael: Yeah, it turns out he's a hero.
Peter: He gets Trump's endorsement with that, he wins a messy primary fight, and then he goes on to win a tight race for Senate in Ohio against Democrat, Tim Ryan. His public facing platform, you could see the alignment with the book. There's a heavy focus on economic issues, but then these little cultural resentments are built in. If you remember, sort of had that live and let live approach to gay rights during the book. During the campaign, he says that he opposes codifying the right to gay marriage, that he opposes antidiscrimination protection for LGBT people. He used the term "groomers" to describe anyone who wants to teach sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. Apparently, that does not apply to a grandmother who talks about sucking dicks to an 8-year-old child.
Michael: But yeah, that's just Mima being folksy. There's no folksy gays.
Peter: He talks about critical race theory and gender ideology indoctrinating children. He's really leaning into right-wing culture war shit. He just becomes a republican.
Michael: Right. It's actually so bleak because the debate about people like this is always like, “Are they faking it? Are they doing this cynically or do they really believe this shit?” And I could not be less interested. I don't fucking care whether he's faking it or he's become this way. This is what it takes to run as a Republican now. If people are pretending to have authoritarian tendencies to win, that's indistinguishable from actual authoritarianism.
Peter: Right. I don't think that the purpose of those pieces is entirely to actually explore what happened to J.D. Vance. I think a lot of it is to just give journalists an escape hatch for the fact that they swallowed his bullshit in 2016. They embraced a conservative opportunist who is now moving with the winds of Republican politics. He wasn't doing weird culture war shit about gender ideology in 2016 because the Republican base wasn't fixated on it. The liberals who are saying, like, “Well, we think he changed,” they were letting themselves off the hook a bit. Politics have changed but he's been a reactionary the whole time.
Michael: I feel like the sort of liberal establishment keeps having this happen to them where it's like they just keep stepping on the same fucking rake. It's like, “Oh, weird. Another one turns out to be a far right grifter.”
Peter: It's because of that phenomenon that you identified earlier. They love someone who sounds self-reflective. That's something that the liberal set embraces, because the idea of someone being willing to wag their finger at their own political set is very appealing to the liberal establishment media. They love that shit.
Michael: Right. And then, you look around five years later and you're like, “Wait, were we instrumental in the country electing its first neutral terminator?”
[laughter]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]